Book Review: Accelerando Will Make Your Brain Hurt - In a Good Way - Page 2

But Stross doesn't focus solely on technological and scientific ideas. He also raises some of the multitude of significant societal issues they create. Here is just one, "here's another potential ramification" example:

A religious college in Cairo is considering issues of nanotechnology: If replicators are used to prepare a copy of a strip of bacon, right down to the molecular level, but without it ever being part of a pig, how is it to be treated? (If the mind of one of the faithful is copied into a computing machine's memory by mapping and simulating all its synapses, is the computer now a Moslem? If not, why not? If so, what are its rights and duties?)

The issue and ramifications of dealing with minds loaded into computers becomes highly relevant in the next generation. Amber is the next Macx on the stage. She may be the first to qualify as "posthuman." As a teen, she goes to Jupiter as part of a mining and colonization effort. She ends up creating her own society on a rocky asteroid orbiting that planet. Ultimately, she becomes part of a group of explorers who seek out an alien router. That's right, a router like that used for any computer network. Humanity, such as it is at this point, is realizing that the universe may be just one vast computer network. The question is how humans can connect to that network, especially since work to dismantle planets to turn the solar system into a nanocomputer network is getting underway.

How do the explorers search for the router? They upload their "brain states" to a "Coke-can-sized slab of nanocomputers" which is launched toward the a brown dwarf star that is the suspected site of the router. These uploads reside and live in "simulation space" throughout their journey, although their people whose minds were uploaded remain at Amber's asteroid and continue to live their own lives. If and when the uploads return, the plan is to download them into newly cloned bodies, meaning one person may have two separate lives, memories and experiences.

Macx Generation 3.0 is Sirhan. Sirhan enters the scene as part of a group terraforming, so to speak, Saturn in the last third of the 21st Century. Most of the inner planets are gone, converted into computronium, and someone or something is pushing completion of that task in the solar system. Much of what comprises "humanity" today resides near the system's central core, wanting to be near as much bandwidth as possible.

Article Author: Tim Gebhart

Tim Gebhart lives in Sioux Falls, SD, where he practices law in order to provide shelter for his family, his dogs, and his books. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and his blog de guerre is A Progressive on the Prairie.

Visit Tim Gebhart's author page — Tim Gebhart's Blog